


The Village's Luck

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Lighthouses, M/M, Miu is like a technological sea witch ahahaha, Nagito is something like a demigod of luck here???, but I'm tagging it just in case, the violence isn't actually that graphic I don't think, this is very self-serving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 12:50:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20408044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: They lived at the edge of the ocean, back then.  I mean Hajime Hinata and his family, sort of, but of course I also mean the guy from the lighthouse. Not a lot of people said that guy’s full name, from day to day to day: he was the village’s Luck, that’s all, and it was his fault if anything happened to ships around there. If storms came, or hungry webbed-fingered creatures from the deep, with coelacanth-eyes and bones that didn’t work like any other living things’ anymore.A fairy tale.





	The Village's Luck

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!!! I hope you enjoy this fic if you read it~ It's.... I don't really have an excuse, but I had a lot of fun writing it. I'm sorry for anything I might've messed up!!!
> 
> Incidentally, I originally meant the sea witch to be Kazuichi Souda.... but it turned out to be Miu instead. Hm. Maybe Souda is her future apprentice, or something?
> 
> Anyway. I hope you have a fantastic day!!! :D

They lived at the edge of the ocean, back then. I mean Hajime Hinata and his family, sort of, but of course I also mean the guy from the lighthouse. Not a lot of people said that guy’s full name, from day to day to day: he was the village’s Luck, that’s all, and it was his fault if anything happened to ships around there. If storms came, or hungry webbed-fingered creatures from the deep, with coelacanth-eyes and bones that didn’t work like any other living things’ anymore.

There had always been somebody named the village’s Luck, so far as Hajime knew. That person climbed the swaying water-worn steps up the lighthouse every day and lit the lamp with a touch from cool, almost unearthly hands. That lighthouse had such a pale, sickly fire, born of Luck alone... But hopeful in its way, now that this new Luck was lighting it. _Someone_ had to guide the ships home. 

Sometimes the village’s Luck was celebrated for a generation, when the sea was full of fish and the winds were kind. Other times, though, when things were darker... Plague and pirates, sea serpents and spoiled milk... Hm. Sometimes then Hajime knew the village’s Luck got thrown back into the sea. Those unworthy Lucks got chased into the cold water, he had heard, if they tried to fight it. Otherwise, they went with shells and pale, mourning flowers woven into crowns on their heads, closing their eyes as they were led to the cliff’s edge. Offered up beneath their very own lighthouse.

Hajime thought that if anyone tried to give this generation’s Luck back to the sea, he might just have to fight them off, somehow. He hadn’t always felt that way — it was a strange thought, right? Trying to fend back a whole village? — but Hajime had met the village’s Luck so many times, now. He even knew the guy’s own birth name, given before anybody could guess what he was. _Nagito Komaeda._

Hajime went to go see Nagito Komaeda in the dead of night, sometimes, when the village’s Luck wasn’t allowed to sleep. They played card games and read books, or maybe went for walks around the lighthouse. Nagito listened when Hajime spoke, and honestly not a lot of people did that, back then. Hajime told him about school and classmates, chores and expectations, all the petty disappointments of his average day, and Nagito listened. It was calming to be around him, even knowing the village’s Luck could bring everyone they knew to ruin without meaning to. Even then. Nagito’s eyes were unfocused and dizzy; he stumbled sometimes as they walked. His hair was soft, and he laughed a lot. Laughed whenever he was nervous.

Sometimes Nagito and Hajime found interesting things in the tide pools, late at night like that. Hajime bought new boots with a coin Nagito plucked out of the sand for him, like magic — and it _was_ magic, really, wasn’t it? Hajime pretended he wasn’t afraid when they found a cracked-open human skull, too, a skull with bits of shell-crown still holding on, floating in its empty eye sockets. That skull had carried Luck-magic of its own once, likely as not. 

Hajime and the village’s Luck had met by chance, really, but almost everything happened to the village’s Luck by chance. That was part of the job. Hajime had been playing in the water with some friends, and then he nearly drowned. It was a long time ago. He could remember saltwater and seaweed grabbing around his ankle, his insides burning, his friend Chiaki screaming his name. And then... The village’s Luck, usually only glimpsed during parades. The village’s Luck, bent over him, flyaway hair in his eyes, murmuring something Hajime hadn’t been able to work out. Something sing-song, like a spell. Please. Please wake up, Mr. I-Don’t-Know. Please.

It might have felt wrong not to talk to Nagito like a person, once he’d dragged Hajime back onto the sand, getting his fancy rich-boy’s shoes all wet. The village’s Luck wore ocean colors, deep purples and airy blues, sea foam scarves. It looked different, when those ethereal clothes got dirty. Nagito seemed so shockingly human, for a minute, that Hajime forgot he wasn’t supposed to have a mortal name.

They lived at the edge of the ocean — they were fated to _always_ live at the edge of the ocean, always and always until they became dirt and sea-salt themselves. The village’s Luck couldn’t leave, after all. That just wasn’t done.

But they didn’t stay, not truly. They don’t live by the ocean _now_, after all. 

It started when Nagito Komaeda got sick, one night, and his handlers had to prop him between them, dragging him up the lighthouse steps. They knocked his ankles against the stairs as they climbed, so that bruises bloomed there like sick and aching flowers. They lifted Nagito’s twitching hand and pressed it against the lamp so that a cold fire of Luck woke up inside it. Nagito’s head was lolling down like a puppet’s all the time.

When Hajime came to visit his village’s Luck that night, Nagito couldn’t drag himself to the window to let him in. Nagito could barely hear him calling through the glass; Nagito couldn’t completely open his eyes. That night turned into weeks, and then into a month. Nagito grew thinner, and his lips were shivery blue like something drowned. Hajime saw it, from far away in the dark. He saw it, and he thought this person he had come to know — this person with strong, sometimes bluntly-spoken opinions, this person who had never successfully so much as built a sand castle without his Luck swallowing it away — felt more like a legend than he had in ages. A demigod, a stranger to everyone, breathing only a little deeper than the statues in some shrine.

“When this latest Luck dies,” Nagito’s handlers told the village, “Another will be born. Stronger. New.”

That was the way it went in their village, after all. That was the way it had always gone. 

Hajime felt a furious buzzing spread though his head, thinking like that, and his chest burned like it had when he’d been choking on ocean water way back when. He watched the lighthouse bleed cold grey light, night after night, and found himself wondering how many more nights Nagito Komaeda had left to go.

That was around when Hajime asked his friend Chiaki to distract Nagito’s handlers, one day, while the village’s Luck was meant to be sleeping... Except that Nagito was _always_ sleeping now, wasn’t he? Whether he was officially allowed to or not. Chiaki nodded, knowingly enough, and told Hajime to be careful whatever he did. Whatever awful new thing, besides Luck, might come to their village next. 

And then Hajime smashed Nagito’s window in with a huge rock, barnacles crusted along its back like sores. And then he spirited the village’s Luck away, draped over his back, arms bony and fragile like driftwood. Nagito’s lips hung open just a little bit, and he was already wearing the beginnings of a delicate circlet, lined with shells. Getting ready to be given back to the sea.

Hajime only barely smuggled this spirit — this human, his _friend_ — away, to a boat he’d hidden near the tide pools where they had walked together while Nagito was well. He wrapped the village’s Luck in heavy blankets and shielded his closed, shadow-y sick eyes from the sun. And then he shoved their boat into the ocean, and got ready to row out to the deepest, unknowable place. 

“We’re gonna go see the Laughing Witch Iruma,” Hajime told Nagito, though he knew he couldn’t hear him. “She’s blasphemous — I _know_ she’s blasphemous — but —”

But the Laughing Witch lit her corner of the world without any Luck at all. She kept technology that no one else did, and her mind had been golden, once, people said. Long ago.

Hajime rowed a long, long way, and for the first time in generations the lighthouse wasn’t lit that night. Nagito stirred, and his eyes looked milky and unseeing under the starlight. Hajime found himself smoothing down Nagito’s cheek, murmuring reassurances he didn’t believe. The wind toyed with Nagito’s flyaway hair, and Hajime hoped it was helping to cool his fever down even just a little, little bit.

He hoped Chiaki hadn’t been punished for helping him, too. He hoped he would be able to row on far enough. He hoped no clicking, skeletal sea serpents would wind their way out of the darkness, here, and tangle around the little boat like cracking a shell open to get to the meat inside. He hoped taking the village’s Luck away from the lighthouse wouldn’t send houses sinking into the earth, or anything terrible like that.

Hajime hoped –

And he rowed until his arms were limp and burning all at once —

And he tipped the little bit of fresh water they had against Nagito’s lips even though some of it dribbled down his cheek and into his soft, dirty hair.

It could have been Hajime had started off rowing the wrong way, mind you. People could have easily forgotten where the Laughing Witch Iruma kept her cave. It could have been Hajime ran out of water, or their boat tipped over in the night, or the ghosts of long-dead sailors decided to borrow their skins and walk on land again. Could have been. 

But it wasn’t. 

Here’s what really happened: after a good while, an enormous metal hand wrapped itself around that tiny, shaking boat, and Hajime found himself and Nagito lifted right out of the sea. This was a hand of bright steel and pinkish mother-of-pearl. It flexed its huge fingers, and ocean water fell between them like waterfalls. Hajime braced himself, his palm on Nagito’s chest to keep him from falling. He had never felt so impossibly small. The village’s Luck had almost no heartbeat, by now, and... 

And how long had it been since the lighthouse had been lit, anyway?

“Iruma!” Hajime called, hoping he sounded so much braver than he’d ever really known how to be. “Iruma, we’ve come to invoke your... Your golden mind! The village’s Luck –” Hajime sucked in a deep breath — “_This man I love_ is dying!”

The enormous metal hand squeezed them tightly, then, as though the Laughing Witch Iruma was thinking about snapping the boat apart and watching them fall. A static-y humming sound swallowed up everything, for just a second, and then there was a voice. Younger than Hajime had expected it, and muttering what he thought was a dirty joke.

But that couldn’t be right, could it?

“Oh, fine. I knew you stupid jerks would need me again, eventually!” the witch told him. “Just a sec. I’m gonna make you grovel when you get in here, don’t worry... You’ll get to lick my boots or something, just you wait!”

Hajime didn’t actually end up licking the Laughing Witch’s boots, it turns out, though he _did_ kneel with his forehead on the cold blinking steel of her cavebound laboratory floor. He stared around, horrified and fascinated, each in turn, at the squealing metal machines she plugged into Nagito’s spine, his forehead, the palms of both his hands. Iruma’s cave was alive with metallic, whispering faces, hung on the wall like masks. Restless screens stared down from the walls, too, between the stalactites, showing the deep ocean floor... Showing distant comets hurtling past... Showing worlds Hajime Hinata had never even wanted to imagine. 

“Sign here if you want my help,” the Laughing Witch told him, and Hajime signed the screen she held out with a salt-sticky fingertip. The witch nodded, licking her lips, looking suddenly a little shy. She said Hajime should call her “Miu,” then, and let her get to work. No one had called her Miu in ages, but she wasn’t really _that_ bad, right? 

It was a long time before Nagito woke up, but color came back to his cheeks, soon enough, and his chest began to rise and fall more comfortably. Hajime caught Miu painting Nagito’s nails, once, while tests were being run, and together they decided to gift that death-circlet of shells he’d been wearing to one of the robotic heads on the wall. 

Hajime learned how to record data on Miu Iruma’s computers, after a while — he learned what other things could power lighthouse lamps, beyond the cold, unpredictable light of Luck. He listened patiently while Miu told him stories of her triumphs from back in the old days... The machines she’d built so that people could do so many useful things even while they were sleeping, and the dates she’d gone on, and the ideas that had gotten her chased into the sea.

When Nagito Komaeda finally shook himself awake, he... Like Hajime himself... Was dressed in one of Miu’s own laboratory coats. He looked down at his hands — with the crooked machines winding out of them — as though they were somebody else’s hands. When Hajime trotted over to check on him... To check on the machines beeping frantically all around, too, really... He was holding one of Miu’s _World’s Best Inventor_ mugs, with sweet-smelling smoke wafting out of it from a drink he’d just made. He dropped that drink at his feet, seeing Nagito blink blearily awake. 

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Nagito asked, once the world cleared some. Once he could make out the humming, alien lab all around him. “It’s not fair to take Hajime’s face, you know. I’d have to stay dead with you either way.”

But no, no, of course Nagito wasn’t dead — not now, not yet. And no, _no_, there wasn’t going to be a new Luck born in their village, possibly not ever again. But more on that in a second. 

For now, Hajime set his hand against Nagito’s forehead, feeling for a fever, and Nagito’s breath stuttered. He leaned into Hajime’s touch, closing his eyes. He was just a guy, after all, in the end. A force of nature, maybe. Bound to something impossible and unfeeling and dangerous as the sea. But still the same guy who had listened carefully and asked a lot of earnestly naive questions when Hajime talked about attending school. Still the same guy who had looked so quietly proud, watching Hajime walk around in boots his own twisted Luck had paid for, and who offered Hajime too much of the chocolate coated fruit people brought to him as offerings.

Hajime said he’d been so scared of losing that guy from the lighthouse, and Nagito gaped. Hajime told him not to freak out, but they were in the Laughing Witch Iruma’s laboratory, just now, and Nagito said, “Ah… But you told me she was supposed to be blasphemous!”

Hajime hissed back, _“Not so loud!” _and that was around when Miu crackled to life next to them, her form coming together in the air like one of those screens clicking on. She tended to _do_ that, Hajime had learned. The Laughing Witch was static and light, snickering laughter and tangled blonde curls. She smelled like chemicals and metal when all the rest of the world was ocean salt and kelp frying in the sun.

“Oh! Oh hey, he woke up after all! I _am_ a genius,” Miu declared. “It was touch-and-go there for a minute, I’ll tell you what.”

“You said he had a really good chance!” Hajime protested. It was somewhat too much of a whine for his liking.

“Eh,” Miu waved her hand around a little, brushing his words away like so much smoke. “Who gives a crap, now, anyway? Just kiss your little boyfriend and be happy, I guess – true love, defying your whole small-minded village, or something like —" Miu paused, taking in the scene. Then she growled, “Aw, fuck. You broke _another_ of my mugs?” 

Hajime was still fumbling around and trying to process what to say next when Nagito kissed him, leaning forward against Miu’s machines. Nagito’s skin was still unearthly cold, misty and not-quite-real. His touch was nervous and soft. He took a shaky breath and murmured something like, “The village’s Luck can’t have a boyfriend, Hajime.” 

Except, maybe Nagito wasn’t exactly the village’s Luck anymore, by now, was he? He was Luck, yeah, but they’d been gone a long time. Maybe he didn’t have to belong anywhere in particular ever again.

Maybe the way Nagito was holding the collar of Hajime’s lab coat said he wouldn’t want to climb that lighthouse, not even one more time... Wouldn’t let anyone offer him back to the sea, if he could help it. It meant _thank you for not giving up on me_, and _I’m sorry you had to be so scared_. It meant so many things Nagito didn’t know how to say, just then, but would figure out as they went along. They had plenty of time.

Nagito and Hajime only went back to that village by the ocean one more time after that, you know — to pick up Chiaki and take her away if she wanted to go, and to see a new lighthouse built. They didn’t necessarily _have_ to bring the village back some light again, but they did it all the same. This new lighthouse would be mechanical and strange, blinking with rapid pink lights like tiny eager eyes. Miu’s own design. There wouldn’t be any Luck trapped inside it at all, and the old lighthouse would fall in screaming stone pieces into the sea. Dark and cold. Cosmic and cursed. Its shell would form new tide pools to explore, in time, in the shadow of a new electronic light. 

They didn’t stay there long. They had a mechanical boat waiting, after all, and a world full of strange new Luck to meet them. 


End file.
